In upcoming wireless communications systems, such as The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-Advanced), relay nodes and relay communications are being considered as an effective solution in providing extended coverage and/or improved data rate. For example, in a downlink of a relay-based communications system, a base station (BS) (also commonly referred to as a controller, communications controller, NodeB, enhanced NodeB (eNB), and so on) may transmit to a relay node (RN), which in turn retransmits to a mobile station (MS) (also commonly referred to as a subscriber, subscriber equipment, terminal, user, User Equipment (UE), and so forth).
Typically, in a multi-user communications system, inter-link interference may have a significant impact on overall performance of the communications system. For example, inter-link interference may significantly reduce the system performance, such as a sum of the data rates of links simultaneously utilizing the same radio frequency resource.
Power control is a well established technique for improving the sum of the data rate of multi-user communications systems. A variety of power control techniques and protocols have been proposed for power control in multi-user communications systems. However, they tend to be optimized for single-hop power control algorithms and do not typically apply to communications systems with relay nodes since such systems are multi-hop systems.